No! Not the Passion Quilt!

Owen has asked me to do this. I’m not sure why because I've never done anything to harm him, but here goes….

The rules are as follows: Post a picture of what you are most passionate about as a teacher (I'm not a proper teacher but this doesn't seem to matter). Title your post either 'Meme:Passion Quilt (No!) - or similar. Link to this post and force (sorry, ask) five other like minded brethren to do the same.

I’ve ‘tagged’ (said in the slightly withering tone of an elderly high court judge coming across the term for the first time) Steve, because he is, I believe, an ‘educator’ and also because he once tagged me - although it was slightly before I started reading his excellent site - so I feel I have some kind of excuse, Sir Norman Blogster because he has strong views on education, Annie because although she has absolutely no idea who I am she might say something funny, Jon because he will hate doing it and Anne because I like I like.

I’ve chosen this because it’s my favourite building (ahhh!) and because as a friend of mine once said; “The whole of architecture is in this room”. It is a picture of the interior of the Muller House by Adolf Loos. The first time I saw it I was perplexed by what the fuss was all about. Now I think it brilliant.

It’s spatially inventive, materially rich, socially provocative and psychologically complex. It’s both beautiful and strange. It collapses any number of oppositions: tradition and modernity, opulence and austerity, comfort and risk and leaves them all up in the air, in a state of perpetual motion. As an architect you couldn’t do any better.

It also reminds me of two key moments in my own education. One was reading the brilliant essay by Beatriz Colominia about this house which opened my eyes to a whole way of looking at and experiencing architecture, and the other was a lecture by Robin Evans on the social and psychological development of domestic architecture, the relationship between the forms, shapes and organisations of architecture and the social organisation of the family. Both of them suggested that architecture, uniquely perhaps, has a constructive role in the way we organise ourselves as bodies in space. Not as an excursion or a comment in the way that a play or an art installation might, but there, right in the centre, all the time, everywhere.

Shameless Plug

I recommend anyone who finds themselves near Hastings over the next month to pop in here to see John Holland’s (absolutely no relation, no way, honest) latest exhibition called Food Production. It’s really very good. From 23rd May till 20th June.

Here’s a quote from the press release:

John Holland’s work takes the form of environments – installations of objects and constructions which contain great variations of scale and detail. They are fictive spaces, often based on remembered liminal spaces like feral gardens or woodland at the edges of surburbia. They are an attempt to form a response to, or even just a definition of, nature hence they tend to be confused, romantic, toxic, cynical, hopeful, a bit rubbish, and ultimately doomed.

(It) sounded like a light aircraft, lights seen were 2 steady white, 1 green and I red flashing…

From the nice people at Things two great links; the first to here, recently released government files on UFO sightings. Amazing stuff that reads like an old episode of Doctor Who or a Brit science fiction film from the ‘60’s with transcripts of questions in the House of Lords and earnest conspiracy theorist questions stonewalled by MOD officials.

I remember reading a few years ago an essay of a deconstructivist bent that argued conspiracy theory was an example of post structuralist discourse in that it destabilised meaning and cast doubt on truth. This seems an obvious point at first but it had a subtler resonance missed by conspiracy theorists themselves. The point about these theories is that they cannot be proved. They are by their nature in permanent opposition to the truth. As soon as they are proved they become the official line which must then be disproved, or opened back up to question. This is why they lend themselves to outcasts and occultists who define themselves by their outsider status, using conspiracy theory as a scaffold on which to hang their disbelief. This is also of course the kind of labyrinthine hall of mirrors so beloved of post-structuralism.

The point of conspiracy theory is not to uncover the truth (whatever people might say to the contrary) but to question the truth in the first place. UFO’s are the ultimate conspiracy theory because the question is always phrased as; “why haven’t we seen them?” and not; “why would we?”.

I love UFO photographs though. I’m fascinated by the effort that goes into them and their geneology. They speculate on the design of unknown objects, each one contributing to a collective sense of what such things might be. Also, why are they round? We have rockets and ‘they’ have discs. I’m convinced this is something to do with their ambiguity, whether they are coming towards us or away, whether they are large or small. It allows them to hover forever at the edge of our knowledge, a constant source of anxiety and speculation.

The second link more prosaically is to Chris’s British Road Directory which as well as being a site of extraordinary research contains some amazing material including photographs of the building of the M1 motorway that are strangely moving, and an archive of old road signs.

The wonderful I Like stays strangely silent on the subject of UFO’s (suspicious that) but does have a link to Utopia Brittanica, a site devoted to tracing the history of utopian communities in the UK. This is a theme close to my heart and I wrote a piece not so long ago about such places and in particular one in the village where I grew up which fascinated me as a child and continues to have a hold on my imagination now.

At the time of writing it - for a German magazine called Die Planung - I tried to do some research for it and failed, largely. Unfortunately Utopia Brittanica stops its search at 1945 but it’s highly likely that someone somewhere is compiling a site about Hippie Communities in the Essex Countryside During the 1980’s. If there isn't I want to know why. Perhaps the information contained within it is too dangerous and it has been suppressed. Suspicious, very suspicious.